Thomas de Waal’s Great Catastrophe—which is how the Armenians refer to what happened to them in 1915–1916—has a different tone and a different agenda. De Waal’s book is largely journalism, not historiography. It briefly and accurately describes what happened in 1915–1916 but then goes on to survey Armenian-Turkish relations during the past hundred years and the various, and sometimes contradictory, narratives that emerged over the decades. It reviews the Palestinian-inspired terrorist campaign against Turkish targets abroad in the 1970s and 1980s by the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia. The members, who murdered a string of Turkish diplomats, including in the United States, trained in Lebanon with the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. De Waal then surveys the secret and subsequently open Turkish-Armenian diplomatic dance since then, which has failed to inaugurate full diplomatic relations between Turkey and the Republic of Armenia or to achieve a commonly agreed narrative about what had happened. Over the years, de Waal has written extensively about the politics of the Caucasus, and his expertise is brought to bear in the present volume, especially in relation to the current troubled state of play between Armenia and its Muslim neighbor, Azerbaijan.

Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East embeds the Armenian tragedy in World War I. The book is a general history, based mainly on published works, with a smattering of original documentation, describing refreshingly how the Ottoman Empire waged and experienced the Great War. The Ottomans unwisely chose the wrong side and ended up fighting simultaneously against Russia (in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia) and the British (in the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine and Syria), while also fending off smaller challenges from Arab tribesmen in the Hijaz (from June 1916) and Greeks in the Aegean (from June 1917). The wonder is that the weak, impoverished Empire, which during the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 lost chunks of its territory to a bunch of little-league states and which had a poorly organized and poorly equipped army going into the Great War (though German officers and equipment helped out), successfully held off the Russians and British for some three years. Rogan doesn’t really explain how this happened. Of course, Allied generals blundered here and there (as, indeed, did Turkish generals). That’s war. But the Turks had a secret weapon—the physical and psychological makeup of the Turkish peasantry, who formed the backbone of the Ottoman army (the Christians, of course, ranged from untrustworthy to disloyal, while the Arabs, as the Turks saw it, had stabbed the empire in the back). Throughout the war, the Turks proved to have enormous stamina, courage and obstinacy (traits, incidentally, they again displayed in the Korean Peninsula some four decades later).

Rogan devotes a lengthy chapter, and the odd paragraph, to the Armenian massacres in the spring and summer of 1915 (he seems unaware that there was a “second stage,” in 1916, in which the Turks finished off many of the deportees who had reached the Syrian deserts). He sometimes calls what happened to the Armenians a “genocide”—but in a curious footnote explains his use of the term as follows: “The government of Turkey and the official historical establishment . . . continue to reject the use of the term ‘genocide’ . . . However, a growing number of Turkish scholars and intellectuals have struggled to open the debate on this once taboo subject . . . In support of their courageous efforts to force an honest reckoning with Turkey’s past, as well as from conviction, I refer here to the wartime annihilation of Armenians as a genocide.”

All too often, Rogan appears to portray specific deportations and mass murders as Ottoman efforts at preemption of possible local Armenian rebellion—as acts of Turkish self-defense—as when speaking of the deportations from Deurt Yol and Alexandretta, the siege and slaughter in Zeytun, or even the roundup of the Armenian elite in Constantinople on April 24. The Turks, Rogan writes, “aimed to decapitate the political and cultural leadership of the Armenian community in advance of a possible [Allied] invasion of the capital to prevent the Armenians from making common cause with the invaders.”

But in fact the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the empire’s governing party, had been planning mass deportation and massacre for months before April 24 (actually, the roundup of the leaders began on April 19), as Akçam and Kévorkian have shown. The CUP leadership for years beforehand regarded the Armenians as a general threat to the well-being and integrity of the empire and saw the genocide as an act of defensive preemption.

 

THE CENTRAL question that preoccupies all historians of the genocide is “why”? Why did the Turks murder these hundreds of thousands of Armenians? Contemporary historians all agree that multiple causes were at work. But each tends to lay stress on a single cause as preeminent. Suny, for example, writes: “The story . . . is that the Genocide was neither religiously motivated nor a struggle between two contending nationalisms, one of which destroyed the other [a view Suny attributes to historian Bernard Lewis], but rather the pathological response of desperate leaders who sought security against a people they had both constructed as enemies and driven into radical opposition to the regime under which they had lived for centuries.” In order to save the falling empire, Ottoman ministers Enver and Talaat sought to demographically reconfigure (or Turkify) it to render it more robust and efficient.

Other scholars have pointed to socioeconomic reasons: The CUP wanted to build a new, modern empire-state whose stability would be enhanced if commerce, industry and artisanship passed from Christian into Muslim Turkish hands; as well, the confiscated wealth of the deportees would help fund the war effort.

What to make of the welter of explanations of the genocide? A new perspective is needed. There were different levels of perpetration, with different motives at play in different segments of Turkish (and Kurdish) society. At the national level, among the CUP decision makers who launched and orchestrated the genocide of 1915–16 (primarily Talaat and Enver), there was a clear desire to fortify the empire by ridding it of its threatening internal Christian enemies, who they believed had stabbed or were stabbing the empire in the back, both through the reform process urged on the empire by the Christian powers, and in a more literal way during the war. Revenge, even on a personal level, also played a major role among the key CUP leaders who hailed from the Balkans, where Christians had driven out the Ottomans (a blow to ethnic-national pride) and dispossessed the Turkish Muslim element. And the CUP leaders also had an economic and Social Darwinian vision: to demographically reshape society so that economic power passed from the Christians to their own sort and to lay their hands on wealth that would add to their capacity to wage the world war.

On the level of the perpetrators on the ground—local officials, valis, mutasarifs, kaimakams, army and gendarmerie officers, Turkish villagers and townspeople, and Kurdish militiamen and tribesmen—Muslim/Turkish pride and vengefulness, as well as other factors, were at play. The Christian powers’ efforts, driven by Armenian complaints, to reform the empire in a way that would enhance the power of the Christians and give them “equality” were seen as a threat to the natural order—and to their own place in society, which in part was defined by having Christians under them. For Kurdish tribesmen, “reform” endangered their livelihoods, given the considerable sums they had traditionally extorted from Armenian villagers (who were also taxed, of course, by the Ottoman state). The dawn of real “equality” also meant that the provincial state officials would lose a great deal of income derived from bribery and spurious judicial processes against Armenians. On a more concrete level, the deportations and massacres brought immediate economic benefit to the victims’ Turkish and Kurdish neighbors, who laid hold of livestock, lands, houses and goods left behind by or stolen from Armenians.

Among the most important “loot” from which perpetrators benefited were Armenian women and girls. Women were forced into Muslim—Turkish, Kurdish and Arab—households as wives, concubines and servants. Armenian children, abducted or forced into Muslim homes, were economically beneficial. Armenian women also generated hard cash: their captors or officials sometimes sold them to fellow Muslims. Lastly, sexual gratification, through rape and concubinization of Armenian women, girls and boys, was also a motive among many perpetrators, who came from traditional, sexually repressed Muslim societies. And to judge from the available Western documentation, religious/Islamic/anti-infidel fervor among the perpetrators also played a major part in the massacres. Many Muslims believed they were doing Allah’s will.

 

A SECOND problem raised by the recent works on the Armenian genocide is the almost unwavering focus on 1915–1916. While, of course, those were the years in which the massacre of Armenians reached its zenith, the truth is that the genocidal process began in 1894–1896 and ended in 1923. A wider chronological framework is needed to make sense of 1915–1916. True, Suny, de Waal, Rogan and others mention 1894–1896. But they do not define the first round of massacre as crucial in the conditioning of Turkish hearts and minds (and, in some ways, Armenian hearts and minds) for the far larger massacres that occurred two decades later. On another level, the sultan who ordered and unleashed 1894–1896, Abdulhamid II, was also testing the bounds of Western and Russian tolerance as well as assessing both the readiness of his Muslim countrymen to butcher and the practicalities of mass murder. The massacres of 1894–1896 thus broke down psychological barriers and, at the same time, can be seen as a sort of trial run (though perhaps Abdulhamid himself thought in terms of punishment and deterrence rather than precedent). It is worth noting that from that point on, in the two-decade lead-up to 1915–1916, Turks and Armenians almost daily spoke of the grand massacre that was to come.